Sony
So, throughout the mid and late eighties and into the nineties, Nintendo
and later Sega had the market pretty much cornered. Sure, there were
some other competitors, some other companies threw their hats in the
ring, but nobody could unseat the two reigning kings. Sega and its
Genesis system were on fire and Nintendo’s SNES and Gameboy systems were
very popular. Atari tried to jump back into the mix with its Jaguar
system, but it just never could break though even though it was more
powerful than the other two systems. TurboGrapix16 was another contender
and actually made a run at it and had some success, but didn’t make it
past that generation. There were a couple of other systems, but unless
you are a video game historian, you probably don’t even remember them.
Then, the upper management at Sega began to make some unusual decisions,
trying to cash in on the craze they helped create; they started selling
too many variation of their systems and system upgrades. I think that it
started to confuse people. There was the 32X which could hook up
directly to your Genesis and offered some enhanced graphics. There was
the Sega CD which ran crappy games off of a CD. Then they released a
good system, the Saturn without giving people the opportunity to
anticipate it. No announcement, they just shipped the system early and
nobody was prepared for a new system launch. It basically flopped. This
is when Nintendo got their N64 ready to launch and everybody else was
moving to CD based formats. What was going on? It left the door wide
open for an upstart in the video game world-Sony.
Sony launched the Playstation and it almost immediately took off. It offered games in 3D and on disc format. The games could be bigger and better looking. Nintendo went with the cartridge on the N64 and ran out of space. They could only hold so much and the Saturn and Sega got left behind. It happened so quick that most people didn’t even notice it. Genesis continued selling systems and games but kept falling farther and farther behind what Sony was doing. It continued on through the next generation and the PS2 has made Sony that much more important in the industry. They are now the top dog as the 2000’s rolled on.